The present invention is related to the field of Internet communication, and, more particularly, to the field of secure, reliable and controlled communication channels for the electronic delivery of information over the Internet free from vulnerabilities including SPAM and phishing.
Those connoisseurs of the pinkish, rubbery and oddly shaped meat product, or meat-oriented product, called SPAM may not fully understand or appreciate the reasoning behind the application of that name to the hordes of unwanted and unsolicited email messages that bombard your electronic in-boxes. For the rest of us, it totally makes sense. Even the most novice marketer can recognize the power and effectiveness of utilizing email as a medium to “get the word out” and get advertisements in front of potential customers. However, the same features of the current email system and capabilities that make it so useful, are too easily exploited by unscrupulous spammers that simply push as much content as possible to as many destinations as possible. Thus, as is experienced by the rest of the world, our in-boxes are filled with tasteless, undesired, and certainly unwelcome email messages or, also known as SPAM.
Unfortunately, spammers are not only giving legitimate email marketers a bad name, but they are reducing the effectiveness of email as a viable medium for such marketing and, more importantly, reducing its value of email communication to everyone —particularly end users who must plow through garbage to get the stuff they need.
Nonetheless, it is clear that email marketing is a beneficial, powerful, and viable marketing tool and it should be appreciated that not all high-volume email is considered to be SPAM. There are many, top-tier and reputable marketing companies and organizations that send SPAM free high-volume emailing to their customers, subscribers, contacts, colleagues, etc. Among these companies is SILVERPOP, a leading provider of permission-based email marketing solutions, strategy and services. Bulk email is a type of high-volume email that generally is focused on sending large volumes of the same message to many recipients. High-volume email can include bulk email, but also includes applications in which a large number of customized messages are sent to various recipients. High-volume email solutions allow for email marketing systems to push notices, newsletters, and other legitimate content to interested parties that have granted permission to the marketers. As a result, SILVERPOP provides a lower cost communication channel for the delivery of such content, at least lower than typical call centers or print, for clients to talk with their customers.
Benefits associated with the use of email and high-volume email marketing over traditional marketing include significant reductions in the cost of communicating with customers, reductions in the number of calls into your call center while driving customer loyalty, and assurance that every customer touch point is relevant, timely, legally compliant and brand appropriate. These are common benefits that are available through email marketing; however, the dramatic growth of SPAM threatens the usefulness of this marketing technique. Irregardless of the dramatic increase in the use of SPAM, most true marketers will tell you that unsolicited and annoying emails are not effective activities for serious marketers with real customer relationships and real brands. Email marketing, similar to all marketing, is about long-term relationships, customer communications and unprecedented improvements in customer loyalty and life-time value. What is needed in the art is a technique to provide for electronic and email marketing that allows the marketing touches to be distinguished from SPAM.
Today, individual SPAM victims have little recourse. SPAM messages may include a link to select if you wish to have your email address removed from the spammer's list. However, by traversing that link, you basically notify the spammer that you are alive and viable, that your email address is valid and policed, and such action may only encourage additional SPAM to be delivered to your email address or, even worse, may support the selling of your contact information to other spammers. So, most SPAM victims must simply browse through their in box and delete the emails that appear to be SPAM.
Another alternative to manually cleaning the SPAM out of your in-box is to utilize a SPAM filter. Most email clients or email applications include user defined SPAM filters. Such filters allow a user to forward email to different boxes or move email to a different folder based on header information associated with the email. Thus, emails from certain email address, domains, specific subject lines, keywords etc. can be detected and treated differently. In addition, some email applications, such as MICROSOFT OUTLOOK, allow you to tag certain email senders as being on a junk mail list. Thus, there are a variety of SPAM filters including header filters, language filters, content filters, etc. However, the available techniques require significant effort and policing on the part of the user. In addition, even with considerable effort on the part of the individual, SPAM filters are not always as effective as desired. In addition, application of the filters can also result in treating legitimate and desirable email as SPAM. This could result in significant consequences to the user.
Other techniques to control the influx of SPAM include SPAM filters and black list techniques that are employed by email hosting systems or ISPs. Systems such as this provide relief to the end user in that the filtering is done by the ISP or hosting system rather than the user. However, similar to the locally resident and defined SPAM filters, these systems can result in causing legitimate and desired email messages to be filtered and not reach the recipient. Thus, there is a need in the art for a technique to prevent a user from being inundated with SPAM, but that does not adversely affect the user's ability to receive the desired email, including desired and welcomed email marketing or high-volume emails.
Another related but even more problematic exploitation of email is referred to in the industry as phishing. A common development with many companies that provide Internet based services is a need to prompt customers to provide information or take actions. For instance, a banking company may request a user to visit the banks website so that the customer can tend to recently received electronic bills. It is not feasible for such companies to expect their customers to periodically visit the company's website on their own in an effort to determine if such a need exists. Customers are generally too busy and have too many competing interests. Thus, email is an ideal solution for companies that provide Internet based services. By sending an email message to the customer, the service provider can notify the customer of the action that is required, and prompt the customer to visit the service provider's website to perform such action. However, because the validity of a source sending an email message cannot be guaranteed, the end customer is vulnerable to phishing.
Phishing exploits the inherent inability to ensure the validity of an email sender. As an example, a user may receive an email indicating that it is from a legitimate service provider that the customer uses. When the customer opens the email, he or she is presented with information that looks official. The information typically includes a link to a website that requests the user to provide personal information, such as performing account number verifications or entering the user's PIN or password and user ID to access the system. This information is then recorded by the phisher and then used in an adverse manner against the user. Clearly there is a need in the art for a technique for Internet based service providers to contact their customers and provide them with notice that they need to take an action or simply visit the company's website. However, being able to confirm to the customer that an email contact is an authentic communication from the service provider is a difficult challenge. Thus there is a need in the art for such a technique.
In addition, such a technique should also be able to provide other, state of the art criteria or functions that have become common place and expected in email communication. Such criteria include the ability to transfer multiple kinds of content, including text, graphics and rich media, and the ability to transfer personalized content. In addition, the authentication of the communication source needs to be performed in a transparent manner, meaning that the users do not need to take any additional actions, or the additional actions are minimized, and that leverages existing Internet security solutions. Finally, the authentication of the communication source solution needs to provide secure delivery, meaning that the delivery of the content cannot be intercepted either at the Internet Service Providers system, corporate data center, or by hackers using Internet sniffers or other similar techniques.
Another problem that is associated with the use of spam filters or anti-spam systems is that there is a probability that legitimate email messages may be blocked. The term used to identify legitimate emails that have been blocked is “false positives”. In practice, some have suggested that stopping the delivery of SPAM to a system is not nearly as difficult of a task as avoiding false positive results. Eliminating false positives is a very difficult problem to address for email recognition and filtering technologies and failures on the functionality of this effort can be catastrophic in a business setting. A false positive result can quite costly to a company if they are losing business opportunities that were attempted to be delivered via email.
Most systems that are employed for eliminating junk email will most likely create false-positives and thus result in blocking legitimate email. The GIGA INFORMATION GROUP has indicated that based on real world testing, the rate of false-positives can be as high as 34%. ASSURANCE SYSTEMS has indicated that even the better junk email processing systems will still result in blocking 6% to 8% of legitimate email.
As has been described, the Internet and more particularly, email technology has been whole heartedly adopted by mass marketers in the form of high-volume email marketing and has also proven useful for Internet service providers to reach out and touch their customers. However, these advances in the art are deficient in that they are vulnerable to SPAM, phishing and deliverability. Thus, there is a need in the art for a solution that can not only be as effective as or exceed the present email technology techniques, but that can also eliminate the vulnerability of users to SPAM and phishing. As will be described herein, the present invention is such a solution.
Another communication and information delivery technology that has been rapidly gaining popularity is RSS feeds. Although some may argue what the acronym RSS actually stands for (RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, Really Simply Syndication), the bottom line is that RSS is a relatively simple specification that uses extensive markup language (XML) to organize and format web-based content in a standard manner. Content owners create an RSS feed, an XML formatted web page or file which usually consists of titles and brief descriptions of various articles or content that is available in various locations on the site. The XML formatted web page also includes links to these various articles. More specifically, an RSS feed is then an XML file with only a few fields allowing users to scan the title or headline, author and usually a brief abstract. In addition, if the user so desires, he or she can access the full article or document by actuating the retrieval address (i.e., an URL) that is associated with the entry in the XML file. Although RSS was originally designed for periodical publications, it has been used to deliver updates to web sites, blog articles, new learning objects and a host of other novel applications. In short, anything the owner wants “pushed” to the world. There are several similar standards that have been introduced for RSS, including RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom. Although the term RSS is used extensively throughout this description, it should be understood that the present invention is not limited to the use of any one version or release or RSS but rather, that the present invention can incorporate the various releases or any similar, not yet released formats, as well as similar technologies. In addition, the files that are created and that support and RSS feed can vary depending on the actual implementation or version of RSS that is being utilized. For instance, RSS 2.0 utilizes XML files whereas RSS 1.0 utilizes RDF files, which are a version of XML files. Throughout this specification, reference to an XML file and an RDF file may be used interchangeably.
Content available through an RSS feed is obtained using a software client called an RSS reader or aggregator. The RSS feeds are based on an RSS standard and thus, they can easily be read by an RSS feed reader and most RSS feed readers can handle all of the current RSS standards. An RSS reader or aggregator is usually a stand alone program (though it may be integrated with an email program, an internet browser or other communications program) that periodically and automatically searches the Internet for new additions to any site to which the end user has subscribed. Some RSS readers will provide a popup window message when new material arrives on a subscribed RSS feed. Some RSS readers will check the RSS feeds for new content on a scheduled basis, while others wait until they are checked or actuated by the end user. Typically, the RSS readers can be customized as to the frequency of site checking and the ways that selected content is displayed. A user can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as they wish. RSS readers generally allow the user to define the manner in which the information is displayed. For instance, the information can be sorted by date and/or by the publisher of the data.
RSS feeds are similar to simply accessing web content through a browser but there is one, very significant difference. With an RSS feed, when any new material is available, the RSS feeds provide a very simple way for RSS readers to see when and what material has changed. RSS feed readers allow you to subscribe to feeds that you know contain important or useful information, and your RSS reader will notify you immediately whenever new content for your subscriptions is available. In short, once you've identified a useful resource that publishes an RSS feed, you can virtually skip searching for it altogether. In addition, the basic characteristics of RSS feeds allow users to be updated or informed of critical, real-time information as it becomes available. Advantageously, because the content coming from an RSS feed is controlled by the source, there is inherently a level assurance that the content can be trusted. The application of a technology such as an RSS feed could greatly benefit the delivery of advertisements and notifications from Internet service providers. Thus, there is a need in the art to utilize such a technology to provide for the delivery of advertisements and to allow Internet service providers to deliver trusted communications to customers.
As is well known in the art, if a company's computer is simply connected to a global network, it is extremely vulnerable to hackers. As a result, companies have added password protection to ensure that private information is only available to users who authenticate themselves. Additionally, software called “firewalls” is put in place to prevent hackers and other nefarious people from breaking into a company's data systems and stealing or corrupting the information. The invention described in the above-referenced United States Patent Application describes a general purpose RSS catcher that can be used to capture such high-volume emails and convert them into RSS feeds for their clients. However, if a company wishes to obtain the protection of a firewall and a company's proprietary password scheme but still enjoy the benefit of receiving content from a content source running at a vendor's data center, the RSS catcher must be placed behind the firewall in a company's data center. Such placement will bolster the confidence that the RSS feeds are immune to being hacked, spoofed or otherwise tampered. Thus, there is a need in the art for a solution to provide an RSS catcher that can reside behind a firewall while still able to receive content source material from a system not located behind the company's firewall.
Another problem facing companies and computer users is proving that a website or a communication is truly from the company. Web technology like digital signatures and secure socket layer (SSL) operate to ensure that communications with a company are truly from that company. Such authentication is generally transparent to users and is, thus, widely used. Thus, there is still a further need in the art for placement of an RSS catcher behind a company's firewall, wherein all of the authentication systems in place at the company automatically benefit the RSS feeds generated by the catcher. Filling this need in the art would help increase a user's confidence that the RSS information being picked up from a company's website are, in fact, from that company and not a hacker.